One-eyed cats: Art wired for science

A middle-aged man I've never met before is showing me pictures of his genitals going up in flames. Normally this would be a problem. But the man in question is none other than artist Andrew Carnie, and the pictures are part of an installation he has created to explore cremation.

Fully-fledged artist he may be, but Carnie is a scientist at heart. He spent two years studying zoology and psychology at Durham University in the UK. "I always thought I would be a scientist, and I still enjoy collaborating with scientists in my art."

In 2002, Carnie worked with Richard Wingate, a scientist based at the Medical Research Centre for Developmental Neurobiology at Kings College in London, to create Magic Forest, a slide show charting the proliferation of neurons in the brain.

"It's inspired by Richard's raw footage of neurons migrating through a chick's midbrain, which he captured using confocal microscopy," says Carnie. "The cells send out tree-like roots in response to chemical gradients that are switched on and off by genes."

Tree-like shapes, or "dendrites", form the backbone of a new exhibition at the GV Art Gallery in London. Irrigate, for example, was inspired by an experiment conducted by David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel in 1959.

Hubel and Wiesel sutured one eye shut in a number of newborn kittens. When they opened the eyes six months later, they found that the closed eyes contained far fewer neurons than the open eyes, which had an abnormally high number of neurons.

"Hubel and Wiesel showed that what a kitten sees in its first three months of life has an irreversible impact on the way its brain gets wired up," says Carnie. "Irrigate plays on that, with roots exposed to different levels of irrigation producing different plants."

In Seed (above), Carnie continues his exploration of the brain by sewing together identical, inverted images of a tree. "The structure resembles a neuron," says Carnie. "It's also a reflection, just as the brain reflects the environment in which it develops."

If you look closely, however, the trees are not identical. "One of the trees represents raw reality, what's really out there," says Carnie. "The other one is slightly modified, to reflect the fact that what we perceive depends on how our brains interpret that reality."

It's a joy to hear an artist speak so knowledgeably about science. He does slip up once, though. Of Dispose (see below), Carnie notes that the kidney detoxifies the body, just as falling leaves rid trees of their toxins. Perhaps he means the liver?

All images are provided courtesy of the artist Andrew Carnie and GV Art, London